Twitter targets extremism, suspends over 235,000 terror accounts

Over the last year, Twitter has been suspending accounts for promoting terrorism. The social network had already made it public that 125,000 accounts were suspended between mid-2015 and early 2016. Twitter has suspended 235,000 accounts since February for promoting terrorism, the company said in a blog post today.

"Daily suspensions are up over 80 percent since last year, with spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks," the company wrote. "Our response time for suspending reported accounts, the amount of time these accounts are on Twitter, and the number of followers they accumulate have all decreased dramatically."

The company said it's also expanded the team that works on flagging such content, and claims to have made progress on stopping accounts from starting again under a new handle. In a previous post from February, Twitter said it had suspended 125,000 accounts since mid-2015, brining their two year total to 360,000 accounts.

By Twitter’s own admission, quickly identifying accounts promoting terrorism can be a challenge, but the company reports that daily suspensions are up over 80 percent in the last year. The company also noted that suspensions tend to spike in the days immediately following major terror attacks.

Identifying behavioral patterns and implementing proprietary spam fighting tools have enabled the company to sharpen its response time, and ultimately Daesh traffic on Twitter has plummeted by 45 percent in the last two years. While algorithmic techniques account for approximately one third of account detections, the other two thirds is a product of around the clock efforts from dedicated Twitter teams.